There are numbers of defintions about Popular culture. Dictionary.com defines as follow:
Pop Culture(popular culture) is culturalactivitiesorcommercialproductsreflecting,suitedto,oraimedatthetastesofthegeneralmassesofpeople.
Considering above, my perspective of pop culture is basically every activities or products that relates to people's daily life, especially angle of the amusement. For example, television program, music, clothes, magazines, book, internets, movies, sports, and etc.
After I read "History of the Internet in Nutshell ", I strognly believe the internet has been developing continuasly. One of the most significant innovation of the internet is "social media" such as my space, facebook, twitter, flickr,etc. The article explains social media as following.
The term "social media", believed to be first used by Chris Sharpley, was coined in the same year that "Web 2.0" became a mainstream concept. Social media–sites and web applications that allow its users to create and share content and to connect with one another–started around this period.
I believe that the most important thing for emerging the social media is people can share their idea, photos, knowledge, and they can also have communication in the web site.
I am facebook user, and sign in facebook several times a day. In the Cyberspace & Society class, I start to use new social media: flickr, the dailyshoot and twitter. I found out that fusion of Flicker and the dailyshoot is actually very fun,becasue I can uploade special phots that is assigned by the dailyshoot everyday. Before I knew the dailyshoot and flicker, I usually upload phots to facebook. For the facebook I don't really have to care about what to upload, but for the flicker and the dailyshoot, I have thought a lot to uploade photo, because some of phots that I am taking is not suite for the subject of the dailyshoot assignment.
Anyway, what I found most interesting part of the dailyshoot and flickr is we can actually share the ideas through the daily photos. Because everybody uploade photos with same topic, which means the each photos reflects each persons idea or viewpoint for each topic.
Not only flickr and the dailyshoot, but also twitter is very interesting tool to share the ideas or viewpoints. For twitter, we can share our opinion or ideas whenever we want within 140 characters.
The important point is that we can share anytime we cant. I believe that anyone can sharing ideas in the internet is very meaningful because not everyone can share their opinions in the real world.
Not only sharing idea, but social media also makes it possible to share the knowledge. For example, I believe that it is ok to categorize "wikipedia" as one of the social media because it is able to share the accademic knowledge. Anyone can edit wikipedia and compile the knowledge of the all over the world makes "wikipedia". I think it is very impress thing.
PS: I cannot imagin what kind of social media comes next , but I think LinkedIn will be the useful tool in Japan and the US, because facebook is now popular in Japan, and LikedIn is somewhat looks like facebook but it have to include more accurate personal information, so I think that many Japanese companies introduce LinkedIn to find Business partners.
